


Day 11: A Rescue

by fascinationex



Series: MEGASTAR-MAS 2020 [10]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Starscream gets to ride the obliviousness pony in this one, early war, megastarmas 2020, no porn only feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28546434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: “This is all your fault,” muttered Starscream.
Relationships: Megatron/Starscream (Transformers)
Series: MEGASTAR-MAS 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2072040
Comments: 7
Kudos: 43





	Day 11: A Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> no edits we die like mrn

“This is all your fault,” muttered Starscream. 

The sound didn’t travel far, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had. The city had been on fire not so long ago, and the debris was still settling. The front that everyone had seen coming inland from the sea of rust had arrived, too, and now it seemed the whole sky was falling in tremendous, blanketing sheets of acid rain. 

He aimed a desultory little kick at Megatron’s knee. It struck true—hard not to, when he was offline, just a hulking slumped body in the dimness—with a soft _thunk_ , but it didn’t make him feel any better. 

Starscream had barely managed to lever Megatron’s gargantuan, unhelpful body into the empty space of someone’s abandoned and now half-collapsed garage before the Autobots had arrived in force. He wasn’t even sure why he’d bothered—except perhaps that, if they found Megatron, they’d undoubtedly find Starscream too. 

The space that wasn’t collapsed was just about big enough for a scooter. As long as it was not a very large scooter. Starscream had hiked his wings up so they wouldn’t scrape the walls and just about crawled into Megatron’s lap just to fit. The joints of his wings were already starting to ache. 

With his audials carefully tuned for it, he could could hear the _thump-thump-thump_ of a copter just above the storm, and stopped himself from kicking Megatron again, just in case. 

Outside the mouth of their shelter, the pale beam of a search light cut through the dark, illuminating a rapidly-changing swathe of the rubble-strewn ground. Starscream. Whoever that was, he hoped their rotors were eaten through. 

Once the beam swung off into the shadows of the rain and lingering smoke, he leaned toward the opening to peer out. There was a haze in the sky, and all he could see was a grey and charred landscape of broken buildings and shattered paving. 

The beam came back. 

Starscream jerked back into the shelter and paused, wings high and trembling with anxiety, to hear if they’d noticed him. 

The beam kept going. There wasn’t even a hitch in the thumping of the autobot’s rotors. 

Starscream relaxed back from that trembling edge of anticipation. He let his vents crack open, expelling a cloud of warmth into the icy humid atmosphere. He glanced over his shoulder at Megatron. No movement there. A paranoid press of his audial to the big mech’s chestplates had revealed the steady spin of his spark, so he wasn’t dead—but he wasn’t waking up, either. 

He risked another communications ping. The search pattern outside continued without change, but he didn’t hear anything back from a Decepticon patrol, either—or Soundwave, for that matter. He supposed if Soundwave couldn’t pick it out of the interference from the storm, then whatever drone the Autobots flattered themselves was a worthy communications chief wouldn’t, at least. 

He looked back at Megatron. He was very close to Starscream’s face in the tight quarters. His optics were dim and his face was relaxed. 

It would be very easy to kill him—not even to _kill him_ , really, if he didn’t want: just to _have him killed_. Starscream was faster than anybody the Autobots could possibly have on the field right now. All he had to do was transform and fly: the helicopter, whoever they were, stood no chance of catching up, and it wouldn’t matter who was on the ground with the roads all smashed to slag. 

He wouldn’t even need to lie about it. Starscream was a war frame, obviously. He _could_ move Megatron. He could move him a short distance. Slowly. But—the mech was twice his weight. He couldn’t do it without being _noticed_. And then they’d both get caught. It would be perfectly reasonable to make his escape and get help, and then by the time they all got back to this location, Megatron would be dead. Tragic. A tragic, nice, neat, clean ending… 

“I hate you,” muttered Starscream, unhappily confident that he wasn’t about to let a bunch of Autobots kill Megatron. 

He could do it himself. He had a back up blaster in his subspace, and he kept it fully charged. He could pry open one of Megatron’s vents and angle the muzzle inside. His armour wouldn’t save him. 

Unfortunately, what Starscream wanted, much more than he actually wanted to kill Megatron, was to watch his face when he realised Starscream had bested him. He wanted to force him to _acknowledge his clear dominance and supremacy_. And then he wanted to be in charge, obviously. 

In his wildest, most decadent daydreams, he sometimes imagined this happening without Megatron’s death. Being able to order Megatron around to do his bidding was—heady. 

What his bidding would be remained a bit nebulous in his mind, but the important point was that Megatron would do it. 

It was unrealistic, but the very thought of it made him shiver. 

(Well. Either it was the thought of thoroughly dominating Megatron, or the thought of going out into the acid rain. Or both.) 

Obviously, Starscream should stick to getting Megatron killed—or at least to killing him himself. But it didn’t automatically follow that this was best done by allowing a bunch of _Autobots_ to find him and capture him. 

There were still some explosives in Starscream’s subspace. 

He toed Megatron again, watching his big frame rock, unresponsive, in a queer mix of vindication and dissatisfaction, and then, when he could no longer hear the steady thump of helicopter blades, crept out into the blasted landscape. 

Creeping quietly on delicate thrusters through the weather was, somehow, even less pleasant than flying through it. It was slower. The rain trickled down and irritated his transformation seams even though they were sealed, and the heels of his thrusters began to tingle with the bite of acid in short order. 

He picked his way silently through the debris, climbing onto higher—and drier—objects where cover allowed, but was still completely unsurprised when the first minor plating breach error popped up a little under a mechanomile away from where he’d left Megatron’s giant, insensible carcass… 

At three mechanomiles he transformed at last and shot off up through the atmosphere. 

It was an annoying surprise that none of the Autobots picked him up immediately following his transformation, but there was no indication that they’d even changed their search pattern until he broke the sound barrier. Then they noticed: even through the streaming acid rain and settling debris, the boom was loud. 

But _their_ air troops were overwhelmingly shuttles and helicopters. They were practically cybersnails compared to Starscream. 

He shot through the sky, trying to quietly raise someone at base as he did so. A direct comm to his personal line arrived, at last, at sixty thousand feet when the worst of the storm was below him. 

_:Megatron: status?:_

Soundwave was as predictable as ever. His voice on the comm line was fuzzy but the signal held steady. 

Starscream hesitated for a beat. This was really the last opportunity he had to decide against saving Megatron. 

He sent through the coordinates to that miserable little garage. 

_:Find out for yourself:_ he commed, spiteful. Soundwave could figure out for himself if he was collecting a living mech or a grey body. Or walking into a trap. 

Starscream shut the line and went to bomb a tower that was still, improbably, standing. It had almost certainly been evacuated, but that wouldn’t matter. The Autobots would all come streaming to the new location—and away from Megatron—to find out what in the pit he was doing anyway. 

* * *

“I have been thinking,” Megatron mused, when Starscream returned to base with smoke streaming from his wings and a noticeable limp. 

He hadn’t really bargained on being set next to Megatron in the repair bay—but of course he would be. They had many injured, and in theory high command should be kept all together. Nice and cozy and comfortable. 

The lights were too bright after the clouds and storm outside, and the whole place smelled of fresh-spilt fuel, slick oils and the thick slime they used for sterlising equipment—a potent and specific smell, unique to medical centres and repair bays. Shockwave was having his arm—the one with the hand—reattached on the opposite side of the tiny room. As Starscream watched, he could see the medic looking increasingly concerned by how many fingers he could flex. 

And here Starscream sat on a cramped cot, ignoring the dull throb of his acid-eaten thruster, listening to Megatron _muse_. About his _thoughts._

_Did you want a prize?_ he wondered, but he was self-preserving enough not to say it aloud. Megatron’s patience was unreliable—especially when he was injured. 

He didn’t _look_ that injured, actually: his plating was intact, his helm just polished enough for a blurry satin finish under the bright lights. He was upright and straight, his voice was unfortunately clear, and he seemed as lucid as he ever was. 

So Starscream, then, had come off the worse in this situation. 

The fliers that the Autobots were capable of fielding hadn’t proven nearly the challenge the frelling _weather_ had. But damage was damage: he’d still need a replacement part. 

“Obviously it would have been beneath even you to give me up to the Autobots—” 

Starscream chose not to mention that he’d definitely thought about doing it. 

“—but you had ample opportunity simply to shoot me. And you didn’t. Why is that?” 

He gave him a sharp smile, bright and incongruous on his battered face. “It would have given my position away. They’d have been upon me before I got off the ground.” 

“Of course,” said Megatron, sounding like he was thinking about something else entirely. Then, leaning back on his own much larger medical berth, he looked down at Starscream and asked: “Do you know why I haven’t killed you yet, Starscream?” 

Oh. It was going to be one of _those_ talks, was it. 

As ever, the _yet_ gave him a tiny, unsettled jolt. Of all the things he didn’t like, Starscream liked being threatened by Megatron in close spaces the least. He felt his wings shift and resettle, aching with their scorched wiring. 

“Ah… no, lord Megatron,” he said delicately. 

“It’s because you’re still more valuable to me _alive than dead_ , Starscream.” His tone was patronising, and Megatron had a distinctly knowing look in his coal-bright optics as he stared at Starscream.

Starscream felt uncomfortably as though Megatron was trying to communicate more than one thing to him, and felt that he could do it best via intense staring instead of just saying it. 

“You—”

Whatever deeply uncomfortable thing he might have been about to say was interrupted by a medic barging in, too preoccupied with his work to notice or care that he was interrupting. “The thruster, is it?” 

“Yes.” Starscream glanced once more at Megatron, shifted uncomfortably on the cot, and let the topic go with some relief. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so close to being done with Megastar-mas! I'm excited to post the last fic tomorrow! It's been fun spamming you all with megastar fics... and, also, I'm not sure I could have lasted an entire advent month of tagging and crossposting xD
> 
> If you liked this one, please feel free to let me know in a comment. Otherwise: goodnight!


End file.
